Airport Experience® News - ACDBE 2023

SUS TA INABIL I T Y SPOTL IGHT

these airports, that means transactions for food may now help create a more sustainable future. As more investors, employees and customers demand action on climate change, choosing to use waste as a resource and contributing to a circular system offers a simple, cost-effective way to achieve carbon neutral growth.” Outsourcing Logistics DFW was among the first to launch a grease-to-SAF program. The airport partnered with Mahoney in 2019. The program began in two terminals and soon expanded to more than 200 restaurants in five terminals. As of October 1, 2022, the airport says that it has recycled 828.9 U.S. tons—or 1,657,800 pounds—of grease. “Mahoney Environmental’s efficient used cooking oil collection system helps airports meet three goals: Streamline the collecting process and make it work for all businesses; reduce disruptions to passengers from the used cooking oil removal process; and create a safe environment at the airport where risks from possible spills and burns are eliminated,” says Dave Kimball, Mahoney’s president and CEO.

Kimball adds that finding an efficient way to collect used cooking oil from big airports with many concessionaires is challenging. “If hauled through the terminal, drums of used cooking oil could create odors or spills, for example,” he says. Mahoney helps resolve this problem by installing a new cooking oil disposal system in each airport it contracts with. “The challenge with this situation was determining how to provide a cleaner, safer and easy-to-use oil disposal system that all the airport concessionaires would use—it had to be conveniently located and easy to use to encourage proper disposal of used cooking oil,” Kimball notes. At ORD, for example, the airport only had disposal stations at three locations to serve six terminals. Because of the difficulty to get to a used cooking oil disposal station, many restaurants were simply discarding their used cooking oil in the trash. Mahoney identified six locations for oil disposal tanks, which each have two pumps for oil extraction to guarantee no down time. Mahoney also trained all airport restaurant staff on how to properly use customized transport caddies with oversized wheels, lids with

rubber gaskets and locking lids to ensure no oil spillage. “One hundred percent of restaurant tenants at O’Hare now use the used cooking oil disposal system due to its convenience, eliminating the practice of oil disposal in the trash,” Kimball says. “This has created a cleaner and safer environment for O’Hare employees and travelers. In addition, remote access internet level sensors for on-demand monitoring of used cooking oil levels inside of all six storage containers helps guarantee that the tanks are never filled to capacity so there won’t be an unexpected overflow of oil to clean up.” Through collecting used cooking oil from airports, Mahoney and Neste offer a “one-stop shop” solution to help airports manage a large, challenging waste stream with a safer and more efficient process, Neste’s Sargeant says. “Whenever Neste is then able to help the airport make SAF available to the airlines operating at that airport, the airport is making a significant and important contribution toward enabling f lying with reduced carbon emissions,” he adds. San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is serious about SAF—since 2017 the airport has been working to expand the availability, incentives and infrastructure for SAF both in California and nationwide. “The earliest stages of this saw SFO play host to one-off demonstration flights that proved the viability and carbon reduction potential,” notes Ivar C. Satero, SFO’s airport director. “While these succeeded in raising awareness, they often relied on trucking the SAF to the airport and thus were not effectively scalable. That’s why, in 2018, we brought together ten partner airlines and fuel producers to sign the industry’s first voluntary Memorandum of Understanding, committing their partnership further to delivering an Infrastructure, Logistics, Supply Chain and Financing Study to identify the key strategies that SFO can deploy to increase SAF volumes at SFO.” Satero says that the airline signatories represent more than 66 percent of all flights at SFO and the study, which was completed in 2019, defined how to best address the $1 billion infrastructure needed to resolve supply chain challenges in bringing SAF to SFO.

Left: Mahoney Environmental’s used cooking oil collection system includes tanks installed in convenient locations throughout the airport (Chicago O’Hare International Airport’s tanks pictured). The oil collected in these tanks is then used to produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and other renewable products.

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